PDF to InDesign/Illustartor charts

Open the PDF with Acrobat Pro, if the text appears correctly you should be able to edit it with the modification tool.

At worst, you will have to replace the font if the one used is not present in your OS.

I had the same problems, this worked (at least for me, on Mac), working on fonds catalog for our bank client - with data in excel and word (created in word or word cooperating with excel or so, i am no office expert): open your PDFs with graphs from office in Affinity Designer (30-day trial available), export to new PDF. This new PDF will open in Illustrator with correct editable texts.

@paule_PWS : If you ARE working on a Mac and using Mac Word, save your PDF with "Best for electronic distribution..." instead of "Best for printing". I know this seems backwards thinking, but what the first option does is force a more universal font encoding. Unfortunately, Mac Excel does NOT have diffrent options, so a PDF saved from there will be encoded with the custom encoding that will jumble up the text.

Sometimes creating the PDF on different System will yield different results. e.g. creating a PDF from Excel in Windows will embed the fonts with different encoding than one saved on a Mac (or vice versa). It depends on the font installed, whether it's Unicode-based, etc. What system ARE you working in with these?

You are getting gibberrish because the fonts are embedded subsets, which have a custom encoding applied, especially with fonts like Calibri. There is no fix for this in Acrobat as the damage is already done. There are some PDF Editors (like PitStop) that can do a global font Find & replace which can then reembed in a different way that does not cause the issue.

Even if you have the originals and create the PDF directly, even if the encodings were compatible, text in a PDF will very likely open up in Illustrator in broken segments (sometimes individual letters) instead of a complete text block, as the purpose of the PDF is to print and not be edited.

In this case you are better off exporting the text or copying and pasting it from the PDF into and rebuilding the file in Illustrator.

Open the pdf in Acrobat and go to File> Properties> Description, this will tell you the application that produced the pdf. Are you able to get access to the original file? If it was InDesign, you may be able to copy/paste, assuming you have the needed fonts. If it was Illustrator, you may be able to open the placed pdf in Illustrator (with needed fonts active) and make your edits there, which will update the InDesign file. If you must make the edits in InDesign, one work-around would be to move all text to a separate layer in Illustrator, re-set the copy in InDesign on top of the original copy, then use Object layer options to turn off the pdf type layer.